Roshni Rao explores the challenges of scaling career services to meet the needs of thousands of grad students with diverse backgrounds, disciplines and career aspirations.
Today’s graduate students come from a diverse blend of backgrounds, disciplines and career aspirations, each with distinct needs and expectations of their university’s career services. Nestled within this academic milieu, career services acts as a crucial conduit, bridging scholarly pursuits with the multifaceted demands of the professional realm.
However, many of these offices, with their lean teams and modest budgets, grapple with the herculean task of satisfying often overwhelmingly diverse needs. The dedicated staff are at the helm, addressing myriad requests from varied stakeholders and playing an instrumental role in shaping students’ career trajectories. Their challenge is twofold: offering personalized guidance without experiencing burnout and expanding services while preserving the essence of personal touch.As student aspirations and the professional world evolve, a pressing question arises: How can career services adeptly meet an expanding range of needs while upholding depth, quality and authenticity? To develop a balanced, impactful approach, the answer to the question demands a deep dive into innovative strategies and transformative solutions.
Embracing Scalability in Career Services
When I started out in careers service at Johns Hopkins University, I faced the daunting challenge of building an office from the ground up as the sole staff member. Tasked with serving more than 5,000 diverse and ambitious students, I quickly recognized that the traditional one-on-one appointment model was unmanageable at that scale. Yet despite the challenges, the need to deliver a significant impact—especially in laying the groundwork for a new office—remained a top priority for me.
This experience provided a crucial insight: scalability wasn’t a mere advantage—it was essential. As I built my small staff, our aim became to ensure each doctoral or postdoctoral student felt recognized and assisted and that we addressed their distinct needs in a sustainable yet meaningful manner.
Prioritizing scalability led us to embrace innovation and flexibility, deeply attuned to the diverse aspirations of the university community. As we have explored the strategies that arose from this endeavor, we’ve reflected on the real experiences, hurdles and successes that have guided our nascent office’s transformation into a fully realized service at our institution. Those strategies include the following.
Harnessing the power of shared values. One of our earliest and most significant strategies was to collaborate with like-minded staff members across the university. We identified those who, like us, were deeply dedicated to student well-being.
For instance, we partnered with the office of diversity and inclusion, which shares our commitment to ensuring services are accessible to all, to enable us to integrate DEI into our work. As prime example of that collaboration, we’ve made joint efforts to bring significant speakers to campus, which can often require a substantial budget. Recently, we hosted comedian Trevor Noah, underscoring the impact of our combined resources and shared values. This common ethos not only fostered camaraderie but also unlocked vast resources and joint opportunities.
Rather than merely pooling resources, this strategy amplified individual efforts through shared goals. By aligning with partners, we maximized our budget, applied our collective strengths and provided students with a comprehensive approach to career development. One notable example is a project we launched called #100 Alumni Voices. That initiative featured diverse doctoral alumni in both podcast and written narratives. We collaborated closely with our university’s alumni relations office to gain insights on effectively engaging with alumni. This partnership was mutually beneficial: the alumni office could engage their doctoral alumni through our office, while we were able to glean invaluable wisdom and guidance from these interactions. Beyond streamlining our initiatives, such collaborative efforts resulted in engaging services and programs that deeply resonated with our graduate students.
Embracing virtual opportunities. Driven by the need for scalability, we harnessed the potential of virtual platforms with an ambitious two-day career conference. Attracting more than 3,000 participants from 43 countries, this free event bridged geographical divides, enabling global access to premier content on topics such as “Establishing Global Careers,” “Designing Meaningful Career Pathways” and “Finding Networks of Support.” Those sessions catered to the diverse needs of students, alumni and professionals alike. By sidestepping the challenges of in-person logistics, we focused our resources on delivering quality content and creating immersive experiences.
Notably, our alumni, brimming with institutional insight and real-world know-how, headlined sessions, enlightening attendees on varied career paths. Features like breakout discussions and interactive Q&As further personalized the experience. With sessions recorded for flexibility, the conference not only met immediate needs but also fostered a lasting, worldwide community for networking and collaboration.
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